


Three Things That Might Have Happened To Christopher Pike and Jim Kirk

by Re_White



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Mirror Universe, Star Trek: AOS, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-03
Updated: 2011-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:03:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Re_White/pseuds/Re_White
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three AUs of what might have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Things That Might Have Happened To Christopher Pike and Jim Kirk

. . .

**1** : wipe you clean with dirty hands

. . .

There are rumors among the civilians about Starfleet, half-whispered stories about ruthless violence and the messy things that can happen in the dark - they say it's a nightmare in an Imperial uniform. When Jim asks Winona about it she just says, “And what else should they call it? A fairy tale?”

She survived forty-eight hours in the agony booth after his father was executed as a traitor. George Kirk killed his own captain and eight hundred crewmen in eleven minutes. **Twelve** minutes and he might have managed to destroy the Imperial Academy from space dock.

 _Fairy tales_ , Jim thinks. _Fairy tales_. Children pushed into ovens and wicked sisters who cut off the heels of their own feet so they could shove them into glass shoes. Jim considers it while Winona straightens the Imperial chevron over her heart, the steady sureness of her scarred fingers strange and obscene in the light of her quarters. She made a fealty of her flesh after the Kelvin, proved her loyalty to the Empire by burning it into her own skin. _Fairy tales,_ he thinks to himself. _That sounds about right._

*

Once upon a time there was a yellow planet with a pink moon and a mad King who called himself Kodos.

Beneath the charcoal smudged sky Kirk watches Kodos thrash in the fire pit, all wild animal noises and blind agony. Over the broken screams and staccato crack-pops of the fire, he thinks of Hansel and Gretel and how there are mean fairy tales every where he looks. Kevin's family is dead, and one of Thomas' eyes is gone, and somewhere under the red embers and black ashes is Sam's body.

Kirk is ten and that has nothing to do with how old he is.

*

He's made of something better than simple revenge – he's made of plans and purpose and fearless willing. He knows that makes him dangerous.

*

Christopher Pike takes custody of him almost before Kodos's corpse is done sizzling. Kirk's tiny band of followers are suspicious as fuck, and armed to the teeth but Number One's cool gaze keeps them in check long enough for Kirk to figure their odds and give the order to stand down.

Later, when the recovery ship is quiet and dark, Pike stands over Kirk's bio bed, a lean cut of a man dressed in gray, nothing at all like a fairy godmother and _exactly_ like the monster Kirk needs. Pike says, “Eleven minutes, kid. I dare you to do better.”

*

Kirk is twelve when he walks into Pike's office and says, “I love you.”

Pike looks at him, draws his phaser and shoots his gaping secretary in the head.

Her body hits the floor with a hallow thud he almost can't hear over the thunder of his beating heart. It's not fear making him break out into a prickly sweat as Pike smoothly steps over the corpse sprawled across his carpet, the crisp lines of his uniform wrinkling as he closes the space between them and kneels in front of Kirk. He thinks maybe it's excitement, and the unvoiced howl of victory that makes him tremble, just a little, under the weight of Pike's eyes.

Kirk licks his lips, tasting salt and asks, “Do you love me?”

Pike stares at him for a long moment before lifting his free hand to Kirk's throat. He rests it there, a warm dry weight against the vulnerable flesh of his jugular. “Yes. I love you.” Pike's fingers tighten, the tips of his neat clean nails pressing half moons into his neck, and Kirk closes his eyes at the rush of warmth and for how fucking crazy they both are.

“And Kirk?” Pike's faintly chapped lips brush lightly across the sensitive curve of his ear. “I'll _never_ say that again.”

Kirk bares his teeth and smiles.

*

He's the youngest cadet to take the Kobayashi Maru and the only one to _ever_ take it twice. Kirk bargains, bleeds and maims his way into a third attempt, twisting his body between wet, sticky favors and the business of long knives in the dark. By the time the Admiralty approves his petition he's as much a wreck as the trail he leaves behind him, nothing but fruit-rotten bruises and weary bone.

Bones throws a fit, Spock shifts minutely, doesn't meet his eyes and Uhura quietly promises Kirk Finnegan's head. It's a strange, warm thing, his incestuous little family of traitors and the way they flinch for him, at the things he does and allows done to him.

 _Pike_ doesn't flinch. He kisses Kirk on the forehead, a dry obscenity of affection and pushes him into the shower, deftly scrubbing away filth and blood with sure, steely hands, whispering plans and praise under the cover of steam while Kirk drifts numbly inside his own head.

*

Kirk gets five sessions in the agonizer after he beats the test. He's disciplined, not because he cheated, but because he wouldn't tell them how. (He's going to need Gaila again, in _one_ piece, not several).

Pike is the one who presses the button, and watches, cool and impassive on the other side of the booth while Kirk writhes. And that's the way it has to be. They have a secret (“I love you.”) and there are things that have to happen if they want to keep it that way, if they want to burn down the world and give it a chance to grow back into something better, cleaner, and brighter. Something _worth_ George Kirk's life and he doesn't hate Pike.

Not for the agonizer or the years spent under his patronage.

Hate will come later, when Pike gives Kirk everything but himself.

*

Kirk has his ship, his tiny family of knife-eyed survivors and a scar stretching across his belly from where Number One tried to gut him. The universe is his, spread out and wide open, teeming with possibilities and Kirk wants to devour them all. Eat up everything the black has to offer and then go a little further – there's a pit inside him and he has to fill it, or tear himself apart trying.

There's a disgusting little notion worming around in the dark corners of his mind, a small blight of an idea that has him gnashing his teeth with stupid want and bitter disgust – that maybe, just fucking _maybe_ , if he pushes far enough into the unknown, he'll find Pike on the other side of it.

It makes him sick, that stubborn black pearl of hope. The fact is, he's not ever going to stumble upon Pike in a glass coffin, and even if he did, Kirk is the one who put him there.

*

Once upon a time Captain Kirk found himself on the other side of the looking glass.

*

There are no agony booths in the brig of the USS Enterprise and when Kirk notices the absence he laughs. And he keeps laughing, until the guard starts to tremble, beads of nervous sweat rolling down his soft pink face and Kirk keeps laughing, just to _see_.

He almost can't believe it, how clean it is over here and how _easy_ they all are, like no one ever taught them to hide or what real pain was. It makes them all look lighter somehow, as though unanchored by the gravity of survival and the weight of ugly deeds.

Kirk feels like he'll crush them if he breathes too hard –like he's a black hole among flecks of stardust.

He stops laughing when not-Pike arrives, looking as smooth and untouchable as he ever did in Kirk's universe, the pale blue light of the security field humming softly between them. The palms of Kirk's hands tingle and his belly tightens.

He hasn't seen Christopher Pike in two years, one month and sixteen days and in truth, Kirk isn't seeing him now.

The guard doesn't actually piss himself in relief when not-Pike dismisses him, but it's a near thing. Kirk winks at him as he leaves.

When not-Pike moves to the console Kirk watches him with interest. If the scrutiny bothers him, he doesn't let it show. He ignores Kirk, totally occupied with hacking the security protocol and that's when Kirk is hit with the weight of familiarity. He _knows_ that casual indifference, has tasted that coolly unaffected silence from the other side of agony booths and the sticky discomfort of dozens of necessary fucks, and countless, _countless_ fights he started and finished with Pike's name written in the dark spaces around his heart (“I love you.”).

When the force field drops not-Pike steps into the holding cell, seemingly oblivious to the multitude of ways Kirk could kill him. He could for example, take not-Pike's cane and bash in his skull. Paint the white walls of the brig bright red. Or knock him to the ground and strangle him, press the length of the cane to his trachea and crush it under his weight.

He does none of those things by the time not-Pike is close enough for Kirk to smell his after-shave and he isn't really sure why.

“What's it like?” The _'On your side'_ , goes unsaid.

Kirk wants to counter it with _'Before or after you helped me burn it down?'_ and that thought is a sweet one, makes him grin even though the scar across his belly aches with sour regrets. “It's a fairy tale,” he finally says. “Princesses and ice cream for everyone. You'd love it.”

Not-Pike's face shifts, head cocked in banal amusement.

“And who's the monster, Kirk?”

“Monster?”

“There's always a monster.”

“Ah.” Silence, as Kirk numbly counts the lines on not-Pike's face, no fewer than his Pike had before he made Kirk put a phaser to his temple, but he still looks strangely young.

“Pretty sure the monster's me, Pike.”

The anger is white hot, and abrupt, a razor-sharp star burst in the middle of his chest. He wants to tear this Pike apart. Wants to crawl inside him and see what it looks like from _his_ side - the clean bright side of a universe where people can say “I love you” without shooting the witnesses, where Kirk really _is_ the monster, and not Pike.

Kirk hates him and the burn of it is like a drop of bitter acid eating away at what he is and what he could have been and still, **still**. Kirk loves him. The weight of it is awful and always has been, a staggering pressure one deep breath away from crushing his lungs, and squeezing his already twisted, fucked-up heart in two.

Kirk reaches out and grips the back of Pike's neck tight, tight, tight, because it's as close as he can get, and will ever be again. “I don't forgive you.”

“Good.” Pike answers, letting his cane clatter to the sterile floor. “Good,” he hisses against the shell of Kirk's ear. “Because I don't forgive you either.”

 _'For not being him'_ , he doesn't say. But it's there, with all the other reasons this Pike has to hate him. Kirk can hear all those nasty accusations writ large in the scrape of Pike's teeth across the curve of his jaw and the harsh, wet bite that follows. _For being the **wrong one'**._

It's not a kiss, the hot press of Pike's mouth against his, but Kirk wants it to be, and he whines for it, hands fisting in Pike's uniform as Kirk drags him down to the cold floor. Once there, he wraps his legs around Pike's narrow hips like he has a hundred times before. Pike doesn't taste like anything but spit and a coppery hint of blood – Kirk groans for it, laps for more like a fucking dog, desperate to conquer and pillage whatever he can reach. Kirk wants to carve out a memory of himself in the secret places of Pike's mouth, in the red swell of his bottom lip and the tip of his tongue.

Kirk grunts and fights Pike's uniform until he can slip his hands up the bare skin of his back, fingers skittering briefly over a splay of scar tissue at the base of his spine. Pike nips at his lips, and grinds down when Kirk pushes up, and for a while it's just the wet business of angry mouths and the mean clench of needful bodies, the slap of prickly hot skin and strangled breath turning the sterile silence of the brig into something coarse and ugly and that much closer to feeling like home.

Kirk tries to swallow every sound Pike makes and rakes his fingernails down Pike's sweat slick back, charcoal gray Admiral's uniform rucked up under his arms, trousers rudely tugged out of the way just enough to get them both sticky and panting, grinding against each other like stupid animals in rut.

It's hot and good and Pike knows exactly how to touch him.

“Did you fuck him like this too?”

“No,” Pike answers, grabbing a fist-full of Kirk's hair and yanking his head back sharply, mouth sucking angry red bruises into Kirk's throat as his free hand jacks them both hard and fast, his fingers rough and familiar against Kirk's cock.

“I got on my _knees_ for him.”

Kirk bucks and makes a broken fucked up noise, but Pike just keeps going, because the worst has already happened to them both.

“And Kirk? I'll _never_ do the same for you.”

*

He cries after, or tries to. He doesn't live happily ever after.

. . .

**2** : no vacant dream

. . .

Christopher Pike isn't ready for the desert. For the hot press of a blue sky and the momentary pleasure of starry nights. He isn't ready to be grounded by age and distinction, constrained by the ordinary while new ideas and fresh minds punch through the Earth's atmosphere without him.

He never wanted to fly a desk and any captain who does never went into the sky for the right reasons.

*

Thirty-two hours after Kirk illegally transports Pike out of his shiny new Admiral's office on Earth, they discuss the matter (inasmuch as he and Kirk are capable of discussing anything) in a Jeffery's tube down in deck six of the Enterprise.

“Fly.” Kirk says.

His hands are cool and rough on Pike's skin, nicked with scars from a life before Starfleet, the finger bones of his left hand slanting slightly out of true, the crooked mementos of secrets long buried in Iowa.

Pike's own scars are less visible, tucked away under his uniform, silver-pink streaks across his belly from flying shrapnel, little knots of scar tissue from smaller projectiles and more than one phaser burn marring the map of his back. Kirk has had his mouth on all of them at one time or another, studying them with his lips and tongue like he could taste the stories behind them given enough time.

 _Time_ , Pike thinks. Time isn't about *more*, it's about what you can *have*. And what you can give up.

Kirk sighs a knowing laugh in the dark and says again, “ _Fly_.”

*

Number One is already waiting for him when he gets to Starbase 10. Pike had a speech ready, but he abandons it when he takes his first good look at her. She doesn't smile, not with her mouth, but Pike sees it in the set of her shoulders and the delicate lines around her dark eyes.

She hitches her bag up on her shoulder and reaches into his jacket, retrieving the PADD in his pocket, utterly undeterred by the concept of boundaries. She makes an unimpressed noise as she quickly scrolls through his dossier.

“You are unorganized and inefficient,” she announces as they make their way towards the shuttle.

Pike smiles. “I missed you too.”

*

Winona Kirk is all hard edges, the softness of youth burned away under the acid glare of grief and the fallout from survival. She's busy putting the fear of god into a bunch of trembling greenhorns when he tracks her down in a shipyard outside Birmingham.

She stares at him a long time as welding sparks fall and the yard roars with the business of building star ships. Pike thinks of what it was like a life time ago, when the world was just him, Winona and George, pulling pranks and drinking too much as they tore through the academy with no thought towards tomorrow.

She hugs him, hard and brief before pulling away and punching him square in the jaw. She gives him an ice pack and a shot of tequila later, laughing hysterically with one arm slung around his shoulders as she comms her commanding officer to tell him that she's getting the hell out of dodge.

*

Pike finds Philip Boyce drinking before noon at a medical conference on Risa, loudly heckling the key note speaker from the safety of his hotel room. He's more or less in uniform, sitting up on the bed with his pants undone, his shoes still on, a martini in one hand, and a bright orange blowgun in the other as he yells at the vidscreen.

“Oh fuck you, Morris! 'Grafting neural tissue to the cerebral cortex is a medical impossibility' my ass!”

Boyce glances at Pike and gestures rudely at the screen. “Look at him, snot-nosed little twerp wouldn't know a sneeze from a wet fart.” He knocks back the rest of his drink, blindly tossing the empty martini glass for parts unknown before firing a suction cup arrow at the face of the aforementioned twerp on the vid screen.

Boyce sighs and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. He runs his hands through his silver hair and Pike thinks to himself, _When did we get old?_ before dismissing the thought as needlessly pessimistic. Boyce gives him the once over, blatantly assessing and terminally unimpressed.

“Well, come on then, I don't have all damn day.”

Pike smiles and reaches for his comm. “Two to beam up.”

*

Kirk sneaks him onto the deserted bridge when the ship is docked above a friendly red planet, smiling as he pushes Pike into the Captain's chair and strips.

He rides Pike with the stars at his back, and Pike's mouth on his throat. He pants and groans ridiculous, beautiful filth as Pike presses bruises into his rolling hips. Kirk comes laughing, loud and shameless as Pike shudders and tries not to wish for more _time_.

*

“I love installing illegal modifications,” Kirk tells him with the uncomplicated happiness of a kid in a candy store, peering up at Pike from under a conduit and grinning.“Seriously? It kind of turns me on.”

Pike huffs a laugh, screwing the last panel in place before turning to straddle Kirk's narrow hips, cupping his grease-smeared face with both hands. He grazes his mouth across Kirk's, teasing him with a brief suggestion of a kiss before the kid looses patience with the game and catches his bottom lip with a small hum of victory.

This...is very much akin to suicide with Winona only a few engineering shafts away and undoubtedly armed, but Kirk is warm beneath him, radiating mischief and cheerful lust. It's an unexpectedly electric thought, to be down in the belly of the ship with Kirk under him. Pike pins Kirk's hands above his head, and skims his lips across the sensitive shell of his ear, fiercely pleased to feel Kirk's answering shiver.

“Can you hear the ship?”

Kirk draws up his knees, and squeezes, quiet moan sending little shocks of excitement down Pike's spine.

“Listen," he says, the dry skin of his lips catching lightly on the stubble of Kirk's cheek, "that slow whirl of sound, just at the edge of hearing.”

They both still, and he can feel Kirk listening with his whole body, straining to hear that warp-core heartbeat Pike knows so much better than his own. He closes his eyes and listens to the ship tick and hum around them, Kirk's warm, damp breath against his jaw. Pike dips his head and lightly catches the lobe of Kirk's ear with his teeth, worrying the flesh a little, and riding the slow roll of Kirk's hips.

“Yes,” he finally answers, voice low and raspy, offering his throat to Pike's wandering mouth, twisting his wrists until their fingers thread.

Heat blooms low in Pike's belly, desire a heavy, wanting thud beating just under the surface of his skin as Kirk rocks against him in the dark.

“I can hear it.”

*

If they were other people, they might say “I love you”.

*

The bar is in absolute chaos, liquor and bodies flying every which way as the juke box screeches something like music and Pike laughs in spite of himself as he ducks a chair and throws a punch. Kirk tugs him down under a table, eyes diamond bright, his smiling face freckled with blood.

He tastes like whiskey and adventure.

“Captain Pike.”

“Captain Kirk.”

*

If he holds on a little too tight, if he presses his mouth against Kirk's a little too hard in those stolen stuttering moments between chase and retreat – well. There's something to be said for living on chance and hunger, of living for brief skirmishes of greedy desire and the momentary trappings of mutual understanding. It's enough to share the stars with Kirk, to know he's out there in the black, following the wild tug of his bold, wandering heart.

And if Pike finds himself reaching for Kirk in the dark, grasping hopelessly for some warm part to keep and hold on to, if it hurts, just a little to be alone in his bed. Well. All he has to do is remind himself to fly – to point himself at the infinite possibilities of space and blindly rush towards it, free and fearless, if incomplete.

Pike can share the sky with Jim.

The two of them will have to land someday.

*

/...Initiating Subspace Transmission...Transmission Initiated...

 **FLEET WIDE ALERT [CODE 20421091]**

 **NAME** : CHRISTOPHER PIKE  
 **GENDER** : MALE  
 **SPECIES** : HUMAN (TARRAN)  
 **FORMER AFFILIATION** : UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS  
 **FORMER RANK** : ADMIRAL  
 **FORMER OCCUPATION** : STARFLEET OFFICER  
 **STATUS** : ACTIVE, WANTED FOR QUESTIONING AS OF 2259

WANTED FOR THE HIJACKING OF THE FEDERATION VESSEL USS YORKTOWN.  
WANTED ON THREE COUNTS OF KIDNAPPING. WANTED ON MULTIPLE COUNTS  
OF ARMED ASSAULT ON STARFLEET PERSONNEL. WANTED FOR UNAUTHORIZED  
USE OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND RESOURCES AND DESTRUCTION OF  
STARFLEET PROPERTY.

...End Transmission/

. . .

**3** : none of a kind

. . .

They strip in the cold light of Kirk's cramped dorm room amidst the dirty laundry and empty food containers. Number One's skin is a wreckage of scars, her body a patchwork of messy splays and streaks of silver that speak of acid burns and cruel knives. Tales of service and sin written in small nicks and sweeping lines down her thighs and around her back, across the sharp jut of her hips. Kirk feels young and soft, a yet unmade thing, in front of her.

"Number One serves," she says, her calloused palms laid flat over his heart.

Her kiss is cool, chaste and vaguely metallic. It buoys him up, and straightens his spine. If he can't have his first best destiny, then fuck it. He'll take this and use it to carve out a new one.

They dress each other carefully, her in command gold and him in nondescript black. When they're finished she affixes an un-inscribed Starfleet chevron to his chest and steps back, dark eyes hard and expectant.

"My name is Yorktown." she says.

Kirk smiles, bright and crooked. "I'm Number One."

*

It works for a while.

Number One has the highest rank and no rank. He has no station but everyone knows where he stands (a step behind and to the left of the captain's chair). He sleeps in Pike's bed. They share meals and bicker over who gets the shower first. They argue about away-team protocol and have a couple of not-screaming matches down in engineering that end in breathless fucks and the occasional black-eye.

Kirk is Number One and he is the first to step between Pike and the long knives, to slip between him and the fire. Number One makes quick decisions, defies death and refuses to compromise. For every order Number One follows there are three more that he breaks. For every no-win scenario bearing down on them, Number One is there with a gamble and a cheat.

He has a phaser in his hand, and a smile on his face.

Pike denies him nothing.

*

The Enterprise holds fast in the face of budding war, ion storms and alternate realities.

He and Pike hold together and they don't talk about it.

*

Sybok rips him apart on the observation deck of the Enterprise.

The watery visage of Jonathan Archer's office shifts in and out of focus around them, and Kirk screams, face twisted and red, cheeks wet with tears and sweat as he struggles against Sybok's vice-like grip. Spock is sprawled in a boneless heap across the floor and Uhura is on her knees beside him, a streak of dark green blood painted across her arms while Bones yells at Sybok's followers to just give him a goddamn tricorder you bastards and they're all waiting for a miracle as Kirk writhes and howls like an animal under the searing heat of Sybok's cruel sympathy.

"Show me your pain," he says, and Kirk convulses under the the acid-bite of his fingers.

hot razors shredding the inside of his skull

trickle of blood down the front of his face

Sybok licking his cheek and show me your

the shadows on the wall move

 _Admiral Archer stares at Pike like Kirk's not even there, and that's fair because Kirk doesn't feel like he's all there either. Something is breaking just beneath the surface of his skin, falling apart in his head and down in his chest and under the hickey Pike left on his hip this morning. Kirk is watching it happen with numb fascination._

 _"Look Christopher, I know you wanted-"_

 _"No," Pike cuts him off. "You **don't** know."_

 _Kirk feels Archer's gaze flicker over to him with the briefest flash of awkward pity._

 _"I will not be relieved," Pike says flatly, like saying 'I won't be thrown away' and Kirk's heart stutters, stumbles and burns in his chest because_ one _of them has to be and he didn't think it would be him. He didn't think he'd be the one not to go back (home) to the Enterprise._

 _Archer sighs and Pike turns to look at him (fucking finally don't fucking look at me bastard why). Kirk looks back._

 _Softy. "I won't be relieved, Jim."_

 _And he isn't sorry._

The unforgiving click-hiss of a phaser set to kill, and the deck is a riot of surprised yells and murderous light. Sybok laughs, high and delighted, his hands and face smeared with Kirk's blood, smiling like a happy child at the end of messy meal.

Pike shoots him in the head.

Kirk falls to the ground, twisted and raw, a red pulpy thing gagging-gasping on the floor and he vomits before passing out.

*

Number One hasn't been on the bridge in seven days.

Pike watches the stars slide across the forward view screen and thinks about the best of all possible futures. He wonders how far off the mark his reality is and what kind of man it makes him that the thought causes the corners of his mouth twitch up, not down.

"Mister Spock, you have the conn for the remainder of the shift."

Spock rises smoothly from his station and inclines his head in acknowledgment.

Pike doesn't stay to watch Spock lower himself -carefully- into the captain's chair.

Crewmen pause and salute as he passes them, their names and ranks ticking by in his head as he goes. He thinks of Spock's cool hospitality and Uhura's terse silence. The line of Sulu's mouth, as flat and unforgiving as the edge of his blade and the confused misery in Chekov's eyes. McCoy's clenched fists.

It's his crew, but it's Jim's family. Pike has their trust and their respect, but not their love – something he never noticed until he realized he didn't have it, and maybe never would.

Pike lets his feet carry him down into the brightly lit chaos of Engineering, picking his way through the humming jungle of maintenance systems and the complicated snarl of electrical units. He has to squeeze his way down a pipe-choked hallway and shimmy along a maintenance shaft before he finds the only place on the ship that can truly be called Jim's – an enclosed alcove tucked beneath the warp-core.

Under the ghostly blue of the illuminated panels that line the low-ceilinged walls, Jim lays on his side, head pillowed on his arm as the ship's engine whirls a steady beat around them. For a long moment Pike watches Jim. Thinks to himself with a cold kind of clarity that they could maybe save themselves, if they just hated each other a little more.

Pike knows himself. He's a brave man, and maybe even an honorable man, but he isn't perhaps, a very _good_ one. He wanted his ship more than he wanted Jim's happiness and in truth, he doesn't regret it.

Love does many things, but it doesn't make better people.

Christopher Pike isn't kinder because he loves Jim Kirk, from his dumb jokes to his switch-blade smile. His brilliant, reckless mind.

The way his breath hitches when Pike touches him in the dark.

Pike presses into the kiss and smooths his hands down Jim's back, until his fingers slide home around his hips, the grasping, needful part of him relieved at the _easiness_ of it. Jim tastes like apples and the faint sourness of sleep, the warm softness of his mouth sweetly pliant under Pike's, until it isn't. Giving, until it becomes a sharp, hungry demand. The wet stroke of Jim's tongue against his and the click of their teeth turning the kiss into something mean and hard.

They've never been able to do this slow, do this gently and maybe they never will. Pike's not quite sure why they should even _want_ to, not when they can have _this_ \- hard, biting kisses and the rough scrape of calloused hands on hot skin, bruised lips and seeking fingers marking territory and rudely tugging away impeding clothes. It's beyond good. It's almost a fight and more than just a fuck, the mindless stutter of Jim's hips under Pike's sweaty palms and the quivering flex of Jim's thighs wrapped tight around his waist. The hoarse cry he makes when Pike pushes inside of him, too fast and not slick enough.

No softness here, no giving quarter – just the sticky demands of slapping flesh, loud and wonderfully obscene. Greedy bodies racing towards or fighting against something just beyond reach. ( _"I will not be relieved."_ ) And Pike _wants_. He wants to fuck that memory away, leech it out of Jim, smooth it into nothing with his hands and his mouth and his cock and all the promises he can make about the stars.

Jim gasps and pants, rocking against him, broken voice croaking out half formed words - faster, harder, more, don't stop – whining a high, startled scream when Pike drops his head and bites his bared throat. Pike moans into the sweaty flesh of his neck, tasting salt and the coppery tang of blood as Jim jerks hard beneath him, his come slicking between them as Pike thrusts. Until his own orgasm rocks through him, bright and devastating, like the best kind of pain.

After a moment Pike falls beside him, rolling onto his nail scratched back, shaky and breathing hard as Jim's hand reaches for his.

Down in the secret depths of the Enterprise, wrapped up in the beat of her warp-core heart and the feel of Jim next to him in the dark, Pike believes in them - that they can do this together, that what they have will be _enough_ , if never quite _right_.

Jim's mouth ghosts his cheek, and Pike sighs, tongue flicking out to catch a fleeting taste.

"Number One," he says.

"Captain."


End file.
